


On The Wire

by diaghileafs



Category: The Hour
Genre: Adoption, Gen, Paris (City)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diaghileafs/pseuds/diaghileafs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>15. August 1938- Lix is in Paris, awaiting the moment she will regret for the rest of her life, but Randall has gone and Spain seems like a world away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On The Wire

For Lix Storm, journalism isn’t a job. It is a state of being; something that runs through her veins, something she can’t not be. Holding a camera is akin to breathing, its flash like coming up for air after being underwater, an innate sense inside her, and she’d never imagined being anything else. Even before Spain, she hadn’t intended to become a tittering young woman who attended balls and waited for men to fill up her dance card, no- she was antithetical to the world she born into, the world she never felt belonged to her.

It is said that babies grow to fit their names; their name will later come to illustrate them and for Lix, that is certainly the case. A masculine name like Alexis does not bode well for a child from an upper-class family with an estate on the outskirts of Wiltshire, a villa in France and another in the Commonwealth, but her father had chosen it, and so she had loved it and taken the raised eyebrows and the usage of her middle name in her stride because it was the only thing that was left of him after the War, after he’d been killed in the Somme. Even though she did have a mother, it was not in the traditional sense; her mother was elusive, an enigma of soft brown hair and sharp cheekbones which she is hardly able to recall now. Perhaps that’s why, at the age of eighteen, when Wall Street crashed and it all seemed so damn hopeless, she sold her home to The National Trust and caught the next train to London, bobbed hair and a camera in hand. She did not look back then and she will not look back now. Perhaps she is not destined to be a mother. It’s not that she doesn’t love the child, she does; she feels a kind of strong, maddening bond which she’s never felt before and yet, it’s the same adoration that is telling Lix that she has to stop, that she can’t love her because she will only let her down as she’s let everyone else down and if she truly loved the child she’d be happy that she is going, that she didn’t have to live the sort of bleak life she is able to offer.

She has never envisioned herself as a maternal type of woman; when she was young, the notion of having a child had neither occurred nor appealed to her, and that had always been something she could never quite understand. She had never played with the delicate china dolls some distant aunt used to send every Christmas. She did not have any little brothers to be play cricket with, any sisters to look upon her as an idol. There had been the gun dogs while her father was alive, of course, and they filled the place of any sibling a hundredfold; Lix could stroke them and brush their soft fur to her heart’s content. They didn’t argue or sulk, she could run around after them in garden all day and none of them would ever tire of it.  

That naïve young girl she can scarcely believe she once was, wouldn’t recognise her now, she would hate her for becoming so weak, for sinking to such depths of depravity, for sitting in a Paris train station dressed in her best hat and holding the tiny baby she is about to give away because she made mistakes; the kind of mistakes she would never have thought she could make and the kind she will never make again. The bundle she is cradling stirs from its slumber and blinks up at her, a living, kicking, breathing thing with tiny hands which curl around her finger and big, azure eyes which she loves to stare into, as though the baby is a precious thing, and she is, just not for Lix.

She is a beacon of hope for _la famillie Malfrand_ ; the couple she had contacted as soon as she had arrived four days ago; the owner of the B&B she’s currently residing in had given her their address upon her telling the woman that her husband had died in the Civil War and she could no longer care for the child. A lie, naturally, one that sends cold shivers down her spine whenever the alias is called; she is nobody’s wife and is never likely to be.

 _Sofia. So-fee-a. Sofia Alexis Brown_ on her birth certificate. _Sofia Malfrand_ … sounds right somehow, it fits better, slips more easily off the tongue. She allows her mind to ponder on whether she’ll suit it, not that her new family are under any obligation to keep it; they can pick something softer, something more French probably because that’s exactly how she will be raised, after all; as a French girl in a farming family, without any knowledge of the language she has been sung and chatted to in, nor of her mother or father- unless the Malfrands are open enough to tell her, though she very much doubts they are- in giving her child away, Lix is breaking every bond, losing every privilege that was bestowed on her. It is her choice and it is the right one.

“Madame Brown?”

There they are. The man (Pierre, was that his name?) is tall with almond-shaped eyes which look made for smiling. He is well built and has an air of formidability about him that Lix approves of because fathers are supposed to be strong and able to protect their loved ones from any challenges they may face. His wife, who hangs from his arm like a dishcloth, is very pretty; dark hair and dark eyes not dissimilar to her own accentuate a rounder face, one that has not been thinned by horror and heartbreak. They are the kind of parents Lix had seen pictures from fairy tales, happy and stable, the kind she was never meant to be. That is one blessing.

“Yes, hello.”

And so, it happens: She greets the Malfrands a not entirely forced politeness and they laugh as people do in times when words seem inappropriate for they all know that today is sacred because while a mother is losing a child, another is gaining one, and in a way as they stand there; in a busy station where the porters are hurrying around and passengers are shouting, some still merry from the previous day, it strikes them particularly cruel because there are rumours of a war and if that does come to pass, they will be in different countries; a sea and destruction separating them. They promise to write as Lix hands over blankets and a copy of Sofia’s birth certificate, even though there’s a mutual understanding that months and years will go by and this day will have faded so much in their minds, their letters will become fewer until one day, they will forget and she won’t contact them because she will have moved on.

There are no goodbyes, no kisses, no whispered promises. She gently lays the baby into Monsieur Malfrand’s arms and wishes them good luck before watching them walk away, taking Sofia, the last piece of _Randall_ she has… had. The tears come later; while she makes her journey home, catching a bus as to be swept up in the Parisian chaos she craves, she feels oddly numb- relieved almost for it is over, she is no longer _Lix Storm: Courageous Lady Reporter_ , the weight of expectation has disappeared, she’s starting again.

The tears come upon finding that there isn’t any whiskey left and entering her bedroom (a place she’d avoided all evening), seeing the cot, the small elephant toy which Lix had soothed her with, and then crouching beside the cot and feeling the softness of the blanket she hadn’t given to the Malfrands. Then, and only then, does she permit herself to sob- to sob and scream until her throat burns and her eyes are swollen. She grieves for Sofia, for the hope she’d had in Spain. She grieves for _Randall_ and what could have been.

For Lix Storm, journalism isn’t a job. It is a coping mechanism, a form of control, something that she can hold onto, something she can rely on. But she will always be a mother; it’s an innate sense inside her, something she can’t not be.

_After you left, what was I going to do with a baby? Return to England an unmarried woman with a child? I did what I had to. I live with it._


End file.
